Found on Engadget -

The Wall Street Journal has confirmed Apple purchase of streaming music site lala

It seems that having another delivery system might make the jump into a subscription service more feasible. Wouldn’t it be nice for those that are locked into a single provider situation for cable television (Comcast?) to be able to make another choice and put a little bit of competitive pressure on existing providers to be a little more competitive with offerings and pricing.

Bloggers statement of transparency

With all that’s gone on recently about bloggers and the ethics that some display, there seems to be an abundance of articles about transparency. This is a good thing, and those who take product or payment in exchange for payment of some kind can hardly be objective.  I don’t mean to call anyone out, and it is only my opinion, but how can someone possible be completely unbiased in their comments if they are motivated to make those comments by someone providing compensation.

I feel like I should make a statement of my own. I feel like I should let you all know where I come from on this practice, and where I fall in the process.

I have not received any compensation, nor have I received any product for free. I offer my opinions on products that I find cool, or useful. I will generally write about what interests me, or what excites me so you will likely see positive articles as they are the ones I want to share.

I commit to the readers, however many, or however few, to disclose any sponsorship or compensation offered or accepted for any reason.

You will occaisionally see links to products here, and most of them will be direct links to the manufacturer websites. There is no affiliate linking to these items. If you find a link to an item on Amazon, it does include my affiliate link. This will not increase your cost should you choose to purchase via the link. For more information on how the amazon affilitates program works, feel free to head on over to Amazon and take a look.

Thanks

iPhone black hole – A story of missing voicemail

A few months back, and before the 3.1.2 update, I came across a hack that allowed me to use my iPhone tethered to provide an internet connection for a laptop. This was a godsend, it allowed me to grab a connection whenever and wherever I was (provided I could get a cell signal).

I found out that this hack wouldn’t work when updating, but being the good little apple user I was, I ran the update anyway and just assumed that functionality was gone. Having MMS had to be cool, and would make it worthwhile.

To be perfectly honest, I have sent a total of one MMS message, and that’s it. It wasn’t quite the useful feature addition I thought it would be, and I miss the tethered capabilities.

Ok, so that being said, the upgrade to 3.1.2 left a config file on my phone, an “Unsigned” config file. As you likely know, with the 3.1.2 update, unsigned profiles don’t do good things. The least of which for em was to break visual voicemail. (Here’s where I admit how little attention I actually pay to things around me). This broke visual voice mail to a point that I no longer got any notices of voicemail, nor did I get a list of voicemail to listen to.

Long story short, it was this way for a little over two months. Ninety-three messages. I found them thanks to a client that was nice enough (and persistent enough) to send me an email after leaving the voice mail, asking me “what’s up”. So I headed back into the voice mail manually and found everything that had been building up for the last two plus months.

The fix for this is a relatively easy one, delete the unsigned profile, and reset the network settings. This is all found in the settings section.

I hope things are leveled out now, and I hope that no one ends up missing voicemail for as long as I have..

Battery issues after upgrading to Snow Leopard

The upgrade to Snow Leopard is a good one. The additional features are great, and I love the new little bells and whistles. It also seems that as granddad used to say “there are two sides to every coin”. I now seem to have a dying battery in my beloved macbook pro.

This seems a little odd to me, since I have cycled my battery as recommended, and reset the SMC as recommended. I find it difficult to accept that my battery has lost its life this quickly. When running 10.5.8, I was getting about 3.5 hours, and my battery was showing a full charge capacity of close to 5000mAh. This information has dropped since the install of Snow Leopard, to almost 1/2 the power. It now shows a full charge capacity of 3300mAh some days, and as of the writing of this post, it shows a full charge capacity of 4200mAh.

You can see why I would be a little confused, as it jumps around a bit. I have not had the sudden shut off issues that other users have mentioned, but it still is a bit befuddling to have the capacity of the batter be this “all over te board”, especially after only 40 cycles on this battery.

Apple, please help, and update the SW (or ?) to take care of this issue…. I phoned, and provided system reports to substantiate this, and haven’t heard anything back.. I would genereally say that Apples service is great, as it has been, but in this case, it seems that no one cares to admit that there might be an issue, at least no one that has the capability to fix it.

I’ll be holding out on buying another battery, at least until I can find some more information online about the solution.

iPhone cases, beautiful, and functional apparently you can’t have both.

A month or so ago I ordered a case for my iPhone. I assumed that I would be hard on it, and should get something to protect it a bit. I did some searching, and came up with a beautiful case made by iFrogz.

It looks great, it has a slightly rubberized coating that keeps it form sliding around, and it’s not nearly as ugly as those rubber slip on cases that are everywhere. I have to say that I absolutely LOVE the looks of this case.

Now for the downside. Where the 2 halves of the case come together, there are small allignment tabs. (I bet you know where this is going) I treated it quite gently, the case was on and that was pretty much it, no messing about with it, and nothing that should have broken these tabs. Even with that, the tabs went away, one day I noticed that one side of the case was not lining up quite right, and sure enough, the tab on that side was gone. Soon after, the tab on the other side was gone. and the case barely stays on at all. What a shame…

So, I have found another case, not nearly as slick looking as the iFrogz case, but far more secure. It’s made by mivizu, and comes in 2 parts. They snap securely around the phone, and have none of the small tabs to break that the iFrogs have.

So, I guess you can have pretty, or you can have good, but you can’t have both.. This case should last quite a bit longer than the iFrogz case, but….

Sometimes you just have to pass on the funny stuff

Your own personal chickenscratch font.

I generaly try to stick with mac tech, but this was to cool to pass up. Found over at lifehacker (and I have to admit I’d played with it prior but lost the link). Fontcapture takes a printout, and you fill in your own handwriting. Then it processes the template into a font you can use on your own machine. Need a signature? here is a way. Need to write a “personal” note and have it look more personal? might be worth taking a look.

Link to your own personal handwriting font

MS Outlook for Mac

According to a press release from MS (and stories everywhere) MS is going to release Outlook for the Mac with it’s Office 2010. This is potentially good news for this Mac switcher, as I have spent the last year looking for something to replace the functionality of my Outlook based PC that I was getting away from when I ran to the mac platform.

I came up with mail.app first, and it was good. Next was Thunderbird, and it was better, and now I am using a combination of iCal, Postbox, and Things. My current incarnation works pretty well, but it still has its shortcomings, and I still wonder some days “why can’t I do all this in one app”?  Maybe I had jsut been brainwashed long enough by using Outlook on the PC side to think that all those things should be combined.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this implimentation works, and how much of the functionality it retains from what I was used to on the PC side. I hope that they do it justice, and I hope that they tie it into the native mac apps / data structure well enough to allow it to “talk” and “play nice” with the native apps. I guess time will tell.

The MS press release can be read here.

Time machine – NAS – and bad sparseimages

So, I set up time machine to use my NAS volume as found over on Engadget using : defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

and have been skating along with no worries, well almost.

About a month into it, I could no longer mount the sparseimage.

I ran disk utility on it, and no luck. I found a solution over at bukisa, and ran hdiutil as they specified, but no luck there either.

Looks like I’ll be spending the cash on DiskWarrior, unless someone who reads this blog has another solution.

Anyone?

Ever wanted to bring a shared google calendar into iCal?

I’ve seen many ways to sync claedars, and though there are many that work pretty well, they all seem to have their limitations. I’ve kind of ended up working around this one by setting up a google calendar and pointing my iCal accounts to that one. This allows me to make changes, and update on any machine at home, or the iPhone, and have things make their way to a central location. So far it has worked pretty well.

The setup is pretty straightforward. The link to the Google calendar is shown on the lower section of the information tab for the google calendar. It’s the address listed in the calendar address section , and it is parentesis. It can be a gmail username (if its the primary calendar, or a long address including @group.calendar.google.com if it’s an additional calendar for that gmail user)

Adding it to iCal is pretty simple. Go to the preferences of iCal, and the accounts tab. Add an account, call it what you’d like. Enter the userame and password (these must have access to the google calendar that you are trying to access)

Then go to the server properties tab, and enter the address for the calendar in this format:   https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/***********/user

(Replace the ****** with the address you found earlier in the google calendar setup.

That’s basically all there is to it, the calendar will show up in your ical menu, and you can now add / remove appointments and events easily.

This also works as a push over to the iPhone if you have your phone set up that way.

Let me know if you have any other ways of accomplishing this one. I’m interested.